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Solving no Crime before its Time

The destruction of a ferry off a New Orleans port at the start of "Deja Vu" - the latest tech-happy police thriller from Tony Scott ("Enemy of the State") - makes a few things immediately clear: 1) from the size of the explosion, this is a Tony Scott/Jerry Bruckheimer production; 2) from the location (a port in New Orleans), these gentleman have no qualms about using national tragedies to add gravity to their otherwise lighter-than-air plot (Katrina, 9/11 and Oklahoma City are all cited); and 3) with the appearance of no-nonsense ATF agent Doug Carlin (pronounced Car-lin for some reason), there's going to be some fancy, sleight-of-hand police work in the ensuing two hours (Carlin even answers his cell phone in slo-mo).

Mr. Scott reunites with his "Man of Fire" star Denzel Washington as Carlin, and Mr. Washington brings his usual strength and charisma to the role - this time adding a welcomed, if forced, lightness. But Carlin is more than a detective, he's an evidence magnet. Over the course of the film's opening, Carlin investigates not one, not two, but three crime scenes and immediately uncovers evidence no one else had seen. Either he's really good, or everyone else is really, really bad. The evidence leads him to the French Quarter home of Claire Kuchever (the lovely Paula Patton from "Idlewild"), a ferry victim whose body has somehow washed up on the river two hours before the ferry explosion. Coincidence? Carlin thinks not.

At this point, Val Kilmer shows up (taking a cue from Alec Baldwin and embracing his recent paunchiness) as a Federal agent with access to a super-secret surveillance system codenamed "Snow White". Using some unconscionably poor faux science, a tech genius (Adam Goldberg) explains that Snow White allows them to monitor four and a half days in the past. No more, no less. And they only get one shot at viewing it because, and get this, "no storage system in the world could store all this data". Really.

Since I'm a sci-fi-guy, I'm willing to allow a certain amount of fake tech in the service of a good story. But "Déjà vu" has little of either (good tech or good story). The restraints around the technology are there solely to manipulate the plot and the characters, as is typical of a Tony Scott film, are never more than expository ways to connect action scenes - including one shamelessly destructive car chase.

All of this ties up very neatly in the end, of course, and Mr. Scott is an old hand at keeping the pace brisk, but no amount of explosions and techno-babble can mask the fact that the script, by Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio, doesn't make much sense. Mr. Rossio, half the writing team behind the "Pirates of the Caribbean" saga (yes, I said "saga"), is obviously no stranger to suspension of disbelief, but even within the film's own fantasy world, the ending simply doesn't work. The writers need to bend the rules as they see fit to get to their silly, over-the-top climax. That's not to say that there aren't one or two interesting ideas in here. But if you want to see a film about using time to solve crimes, I've got another two-word title for you: "Minority Report".